Resident Interest and Past Hobbies Inventory

This template is designed for life enrichment, activities, and care teams in senior living, assisted living, memory care, or skilled nursing settings. It can also be used by admissions or resident services during move-in and by staff who update preferences after a resident’s condition or interests change. The goal is to give the team one place to capture what makes programming feel relevant to each resident.

Use it at move-in, during a care plan update, or whenever a resident’s engagement needs seem to have changed. It also works well as a periodic refresh for long-stay residents, since interests can shift over time. For residents with fluctuating health or cognition, a shorter follow-up may be more useful than a full re-run.

An ad-hoc conversation is easy to forget, hard to compare across residents, and difficult to hand off between staff members. This template turns those details into a structured record that can guide activity calendars, one-on-one visits, and small-group programming. It also helps the team spot patterns such as preferred music, social setting, or physical comfort level.

No. This is a resident preference inventory, so it should be tied to the resident’s record in order to support personalized programming and follow-up. That said, staff should still explain how the information will be used and keep the tone respectful and optional where appropriate. If a resident prefers not to answer a question, that choice should be honored.

A full update is usually appropriate at admission and then whenever there is a meaningful change in health, mobility, cognition, or social preference. Many communities also revisit it during care plan meetings or after a resident has been in the community long enough to discover new interests. The right cadence is less about a fixed schedule and more about keeping the profile current enough to drive programming decisions.

The biggest mistake is collecting answers and then never translating them into actual activities, which makes the survey feel performative. Another common issue is asking too many follow-up questions in one sitting, especially for residents who tire easily. Teams also sometimes skip the open-ended 'anything else' prompt, which is often where the most useful personalization details appear.

Yes. For memory care, you may want simpler wording, fewer questions per session, and more staff-assisted completion. For independent living or continuing care communities, you can add more detail around clubs, travel, volunteering, or learning goals. The structure is flexible, but the core idea should stay the same: capture interests that can be turned into meaningful engagement.

It can be used as a standalone intake form or mapped into a resident profile, care management system, or activity planning workflow. The most useful setup is one where the answers are easy for the life enrichment team to search, filter, and revisit when planning events. If your system supports tags or preference fields, this template is a good source document for those fields.